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 ETHOS
Ah, alignment. It's been around
since the early days of RPGs, in one form or another, and everyone has an
opinion about it. Some love it. Some hate it. Many disagree on what
"neutral" means on an alignment axis. In AQ!, we've made
it easy. We call it Ethos.
First, it's optional. Gamers in the same group can use it
or not use it, and the game will flow just fine.
Second, for players who aren't
excited about it, the GM can use a feature called "Graphing a Character's
Ethos" to see where the player's character falls—how he
has been playing his character, basically. This works great for new
players.
The fact is, Ethos could be easily
simulated using things like Personality Traits and
Drawbacks.
But Ethos represents four core facets common to most
individuals' personalities: Order (Ordered vs. Chaotic), Virtue (Good vs. Evil), Law (Lawful
vs. Anarchic), and Theism (Theistic vs. Atheistic). There
are ten points along each of the four axes, giving you 10,000 possible Ethoses. Moreover, technically you can skip
the ten points and gauge a facet on its 1-100 scale, meaning technically
you have 100 million possible combinations.
Rolegamer Democracy -
What's this?
Of gamers I'd polled over
the years, about equal numbers hated alignment, liked alignment, or didn't
care either way. More older gamers seemed to be okay with it, and more
younger gamers didn't care for it. Most who used it didn't seem to give it
a second thought about how or why alignments worked the way they did. When
asked if they thought alignment should have more than just the traditional
good/evil and law/chaos axes (very popular with Dungeons & Dragons
and many other copycat systems), most hadn't thought about it. But most
agreed that there could be others. Everyone had different ideas, but the
two things that seemed the most popular when I asked people was
law/anarchy and theism/atheism.
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